[ published in The National on 12th January 2026]
At the risk of becoming a psephological nerd let’s return to the voting system for the Scottish general election in sixteen weeks’ time. The most important thing in any election is to win the argument, but a close second is understanding the electoral system in play and how to use it to turn support into representation.
A correspondent to this paper claims that in last week’s column where I suggested SNP supporters should vote for the party on the regional list I am arguing against proportional representation.
Let me assure all readers that I am doing no such thing. I believe strongly in proportional representation, and the additional member system we have for the Scottish Parliament is far better than the first past the post system in achieving it.
That system aims to achieve proportionality not by asking electors to state their preference, but by allocating seats in Holyrood in line with their first choice. It does this by allocating additional members from regional lists taking account of seats already won in the first past the post constituency contests.
Let’s take Edinburgh and Lothians East as an example. Nine constituency members and seven additional members are to be elected in this region, a total of sixteen MSPs. Say, for the sake of argument, that SNP support across this region was about 37%. The system is then supposed to deliver the party 37% of the seats – which would be six MSPs.
The constituency contests will be counted first. On this level of support the SNP could win six out of the nine by first past the post. If it achieved that there’d be no chance of any additional seats from the list.
But this is far from guaranteed. Some of these contests will have three or four parties in with a shout of winning, margins will be close, and for sure there will be some unexpected results. So, the SNP could just as easily win only four or five of the nine with this share of the vote.
In this example, if the party failed to capture six constituency seats it would be hoping to get an additional member elected from the regional list. But this will only happen if the people who supported SNP in the constituencies also vote for it on the peach-coloured regional ballot paper. If some of them don’t, the proportion of votes the party gets, and therefore the number of seats, goes down.
If say five percent of those who voted SNP in the constituency ballot did not do so on the list, the party’s vote share would fall to 32%. At that level the party would only be entitled to five of the sixteen MSPs across the region. If it has already won five of the nine constituency seats, it’s not going to get any more.
It is only the votes in the regional ballot which are used to determine the allocation of the additional seats. Which is why of you want the SNP to win the election you need to vote for them on each ballot paper. See it as one vote with two parts. And frankly, if you were only to vote SNP in one, it is the regional contest which is the most important in deciding the composition of the parliament.
This is the biggest flaw in the system. By having two ballot papers it suggests to voters that there are two choices to be made, that they can express a second preference. In reality, if they do not vote the same way on both ballots, many could find that effectively one vote cancels out the other.
This is completely different from the single transferable vote system which we use for electing local councils. That allows you to express a preference by ranking candidates in order. In those circumstances of course I would argue that SNP supporters should vote for their party and then put other pro-Indy parties as the second and third choices.
But that is not the system we will be using in May. You are invited only to put an X against the party you want to win, not to order the candidates by preference.
Some people may think that I am making this argument to somehow dupe or cajole supporters of smaller Indy parties like Alba and the SSP into voting SNP. I am not.
This is still a relatively free country, and you if you think a particular party aligns more with your views than any other, you should vote for them.
Nor am I saying that the SNP should not work with other pro-Indy parties; of course it should. But it needs to get elected first.
My argument is directed not at Alba or anyone else, but supporters of the SNP. In one sense this is quite weird. I cannot offhand think of another political party where some of its supporters, indeed members, openly argue that they should vote for someone else. If enough do that it will deny the SNP the mandate it needs to demand this country should decide its own future.